Last week, 12 students of the OD&M training visited the training nodes (Florence, Bilbao, London, Dabrowa Gornicza) exploring the local ecosystems of alliances between Universities, makers communities and enterprises. The mobility gave the possibility to build mutual knowledge and relations between students from the four countries, and has been a very positive experience for both visitors and hosting organisations.

Student’s experiences describe the rich learning environment of the four nodes of the project:

• In Poland, students had the occasion to work together on robotics based on open source hardware, and visited Łódź where they were able to customize their robots and see how revitalization of textile city looks like.
• In the UK, the week has been focussed on Social Enterprise and Intellectual Property in a context of Open Design, Co and Participatory Design Practices. Through tours, design activities, and workshops the students worked in teams to develop enterprise propositions focused on OD&M activities.
• In Spain, mobility focused on transferring to students the experience of the exercise carried out in collaboration with Fekoor – Etxegoki, an association that manages a group of apartments that provide autonomy to people with reduced mobility. During the week the students had the possibility to know the city of Bilbao and its transformation model, and they visited the most important open work spaces in the city.
• In Italy, they visited the spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi, and reviewed the solutions for the space developed by Italian students, with the aim of adding elements draining from their local learning experience in their OD&M training. Mobility students also presented, as a moment of peer learning, the solutions developed on their own challenges/contexts. Moreover, they participated to the event “Erasmus4Ever, Erasmus4Future” organised by Impact Hub Florence and INDIRE – Italian National Agency for Lifelong Learning Education.

The mobility has been aimed at defining commonalities and differences with their local context and with the solutions prototyped in their learning experience to inspire and influence both visiting and local students and their ideas/prototypes. It has been a success that hopefully will be replicated in next years.

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AbilityMate is a Sydney (Australia) based social enterprise whose mission is to help people with disabilities access the equipment they need. Their vision starts by making custom-made 3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs) available to Australian children! The enterprise’s approach is to use 3D scanning & printing technology to fabricate customised designs for AFOs. They are developing 3D scanning equipment and are making it widely accessible on the World Wide Web in 2018. The enterprise was founded by Melissa Fuller and Johan du Plessis.

3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs)

AbilityMate initially started by running design jams and projects at community makerspaces. The aim was to help people with disabilities by developing custom made 3D printed devices. In this early phase the AbilityMate community would work directly with people with disabilities to assess their needs and 3D print the devices that made them more independent. This has been exploratory and the AbilityMate community has co-created a number of different designs for people in need of assistive devices. These designs have been made available online.

Hack-a-Home Project

A more recent collaborative research project which is still ongoing seeks to test “what happens when you put the means of production in the hands of those who need it”, whether the production of custom made assistive devices could be moved to the community requiring them. The project entailed conducting trainings at various residences where people with disabilities live. People with disabilities and their carers were trained to do various aspects of the design and production of assistive devices, from body scanning to 3d modelling and 3D printing. Overall, this project seems to have had a low general impact, as coordination has been challenging and production has only happened when AbilityMate makers have been present. However, the impact is large for individuals when they experience the power of being able to produce assistive devices to cover their own needs.

Open Source 3D scanner

The Magic Shoes project  

In mid 2016 AbilityMate started receiving many request form families in the Cerebral Palsy community who saw 3D printing as solution to the challenges they face. Members from this community requested that they have a go at 3D printing Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs). AFOs are customised leg braces worn to support posture and mobility of kids and are used for corrective therapy. Currently AFOs are prescribed and hand fabricated by a medical specialist called an Orthotist. After looking into how AFOs are currently made they realised that their approach of using 3D scanning and 3D printing could potentially create a more pleasant experience for children and reduce the turnaround times and wait times experienced by these families. Because of the large amount of work and investment required to make this a reality, AbilityMate was joined by 6 other impact driven organisations. The project includes regulatory affairs, a clinical study with 20-30 children, development of an open source 3D scanner, the establishment of 2 orthotics clinics to make 3D printed AFOs available and the release of an open source package including blueprints of the 3D scanner and findings from the clinical study. A considerable financial investment of $600,000 is required for a project of this size. With a strong collaboration in place and a successful proof of concept AbilityMate has raised $400,000 through crowdfunding and philanthropic donations and still needs to raise $200,00 to complete the project.

Magic Shoes project team

The AbilityMate model

Having explored the production of a number of assistive and medical devices, AbilityMate came to the realization that it needed to create a viable business model. Once it has done this, it will be able to apply the same model to other types of customised assistive and medical devices. The current focus of AbilityMate is therefore to establish this new enterprise model around the customisation and production of AFOs. They’ve started with  “The Magic Shoes Project” and now have now begun to set up a sustainable social business.

AbilityMate are a For Purpose technology start-up that’s incorporated as a Proprietary Limited Company. They have modified their constitution in line with a Social Benefit Company. It permits and requires Directors to act to deliver the purpose and to consider wider impacts of their decisions. AbilityMate will be engaged in the customisation and digital manufacture of custom-made assistive devices. AbilityMate’s products help orthotists achieve the clinical results they expect and deliver effective, cutting-edge options and better experienced to their patients.

In their experience the interaction with orthotists is critical to the safe delivery of 3D printed AFOs because these devices are corrective by nature not augmented like a prosthetic hand for example. AFOs are traditionally prescribed and made by Orthotists, after careful evaluation of biomechanical needs.

Moreover, many devices that are normally prescribed by health care providers have been subjected to clinical trials. Simply having a repository of open source templates for assistive and medical devices does not really suit a large percentage of the market. AbilityMate has learned that it has needed to create a model which incorporates the medical profession and clinicians that prescribe the devices. The new model has three basic aspects:

1. Open source body scanning devices;
2. A customisation and fabrication service (CFS);
3. A network of localised 3D printing facilities

Customization of AFO

The first barrier to overcome is the way in which orthotists develop AFOs in the first place. For things like AFOs, orthotists have traditionally used plaster casting which children tend to dislike. The first problem to solve is to find a way in which orthotists can digitize the production process. There are many types of body scanners, but they have not been widley adopted by the profession. Good scanners can cost between $20,000 to $30,000, and may not be made for scanning the legs of wriggly children. AbilityMate is therefore working on an open source scanner that will be available to anyone to make at a much lower cost.

Secondly, orthotists are not digital designers, they work with their hands, and do not normally have knowledge and experience with CAD and 3D printing. AbilityMate believe it is not realistic to expect orthotists to become experts at these. AbilityMate’s strategy is therefore to set up a customisation and fabrication service (CFS). This is currently the model used for orthodontics and other medical devices that require a high degree of customisation. The CFS would be an online platform set up and run by AbilityMate. AbilityMate would receive orders from orthotists based on digitised body scans and their prescriptions. AbilityMate will make arrangements to have the leg brace printed at a 3D printing facility located closest to the orthotist who placed the order. Before onboarding a 3D printing facility to join the platform, AbilityMate will ensure the facility has all the required quality control and regulation requirements in place.

Thirdly, to fund and protect users this model requires there are elements of open source IP and closed IP. By opening the IP of the 3D scanner they reduce barriers to 3D printing. It will also enable AbilityMate to reach kids in remote communities. They will also have to keep some IP closed. AbilityMate has received genuine concern from the medical profession about open sourcing templates and 3D designs for AFOs. Because AFOs are corrective devices there is a major risk in having an unqualified person designing and printing AFOs for already vulnerable members of the community. AbilityMate is also in the process of raising seed investment from impact investors. For them it doesn’t make sense to open the IP surrounding how to customise an AFO in CAD modelling. These barriers have really challenged their thinking about open design and cosmo localisation because their vision started out with ambitions to keep everything open! In reality this approach could have negative consequences on children and on AbilityMates’ ability to raise capital. As the business model evolves, they hope that the tensions between the vision for cosmo-localization and the practical considerations of AFOs and seed investors can be resolved and integrated.

Based on this three-part model their plan is to support the development of AbilityMate “Pods”. Pods would be localized operations that can support a number of territories in instantiating the model (a little bit like a franchise but using open source principles). AbilityMate would package as a service how to set up a full-fledged operation, which would include how to conduct 3D printing as a CFS, how to produce and use the scanners and upgrade orthotics clinics to digital workflows, and how to draw on an open design commons. AbilityMate would help people set up their own operations in different parts of the world to service their local areas.

Open clinical trials and university collaboration

AbilityMate have also learned that the production of medical devices based on open designs needs to be coupled with clinical trials and the validation of models and technologies of medical devices. In Australia, for example, clinicians/orthotists will not normally prescribe an medical devices that has not been validated through clinical trial. This means that from a medical profession point of view, there is no real value in having hundreds of innovative open source designs for medical devices if none of them have been trialled and validated. In addition to this, medical trials are very hard to do, they cost a lot of money because of the research costs involved. In their opinion, they believe that certain contexts warrant a more liberal approach to this. For AFOs, for example, it is better that kids have them than not. For other types of devices where there is higher risk, they feel clinical trials need to be strictly applied.

Therefore, the challenge is not just to cultivate an open design commons for assistive devices and medical devices, but to build an approach to prototyping, testing and trialling assistive devices and medical devices in conjunction with this design commons. This requires open data on clinical trials that others can build on, which allows for people to build on and create subsequent design optimizations. In essence there is a need to create a commons around clinical trial data and the validation of devices. AbilityMate have only just begun to have conversations with universities about this.

Values and principles and the role of the maker movement

AbilityMate is an expression of deep personal connections with the experience and challenges for people who are disadvantaged by disabilities. Johan’s grandfather, for example, had polio, which left him with an impaired limb. The social stigma of being cripple haunted his grandfather’s entire life, impacting his work opportunities, and had an impact on three generations of his family. Melissa has a cousin who was struck by a car and acquired a spine and brain injury, losing the ability to walk and speak. The state insurance, which was meant to last his whole life was quickly exhausted by medical costs for equipment, and she saw how her cousin’s family constantly improvised to figure out how to solve basic problems.

The maker movement has also had a big impact on the values and thinking of AbilityMate. Before starting on this journey, Melissa did a tour of 40 makerspaces / tech shops / Fab labs across the United States. Realizing the massive impact of producing material things, and the possibility this new model could have has been a motivation as well. The way in which the maker movement merges the idea of the user with the designer and the consumer has been significant. In 2014 Melissa started a community makerspace in Sydney which is where she and Johan met.

Fairness is also a key concept. AbilityMate do not want to do charity, but rather create a more fair and equitable system. They feel that the emergence of a global design commons levels the playing field and creates fairer opportunities for people to have access to assistive devices and equipment. Fairness also means the price of assistive devices. The current high costs of assistive devices adds yet another burden to people with disabilities. The global design localized production model provides a way to lessen that cost burden.

Overall, they feel four words help to express their values and principles:

1. authentic-ness;
2. transparency / openness;
3. courage;
4. fairness.

Team, skills and decision making

Melissa comes from a design and manufacturing background, and Johan comes from a computer science and startup background. There are 4-5 other people they work with. Their backgrounds include industrial engineering, marketing and product management, CAD modelling and UX design. There are also volunteers that are connected with local maker spaces, and some interns with a biomedical background. Overall engineering with a scientific approach is valued, the ability to test hypotheses and conduct rapid prototyping, engage in user centric design, entrepreneurial skills and fund-raising. Areas where they may need future support include legal, fund-raising and finance. But the intangibles are critical in their opinion. They feel that people must have a personal connection with the area, and they are always looking for people who understand the “why” behind why they want to be involved. Often there is a personal story or connection with the disability area.

In terms of work style they prefer to cultivate a culture of co-learning rather than hierarchy. Decisions are made in different ways depending on the context. Most the time there is a team conversation which is open. Meetings are weekly. If there are more urgent decisions to make then less people may be involved in a decision. They use Loomio’s method of working groups and ensure decision-making is transparent, documented and as open as possible. Overall they try to be as organic, open and inclusive in their decision making as they can. While Melissa and Johan are the driving force, they try and distribute this as much as possible, for example by trying to rotate pitching for money or when applying for competitions.

Strengths and weaknesses of open design logic and the future

One of the biggest challenges that they face is in articulating the benefits of an open design business model. There has been lots of scepticism on the part of potential impact investors and it has been hard for people to understand why they would want to give away their “IP”, a constant need to explain and educate people on the benefits of equity fundraising. Alternatively, the benefits of working within the open design business model is the clear resonance it has with many people, associated with its altruistic dimension and potential for social impact. People have been very attracted to the model and have wanted to help, which has made it easier to establish strong partnerships. This has also helped attract talent which has become part of the team.

They feel the open design business model is a critical strategy in addressing the many challenges that we have. They do not feel approaches that rely on patents and tight intellectual property will make enough of a difference. They feel the future of open source hardware is bright if people take the open design pathway. They are optimistic and feel the changes will come from the bottom up.

They see the outlines of a virtuous cycle developing across the open design distributed manufacturing development space. There needs to be ways to circulate value from users and clinicians back through designers and platform developers. As well, learning from other open design enterprises is critical, as the verification of such models helps to create knowledge and legitimacy. They feel it is a bit like social bootstrapping. When there are not a lot of cases it is hard to articulate the benefits of such a model and harder to get resources and people behind it.

At a social level they see an economic virtuous cycle emerging. When a valuable design is added to the global design commons and the benefits of that design begin flowing into the local community, then it frees up people and their time to do others things, and people can apply yet more open source strategies, in a virtuous cycle of economic benefits. As open design enterprises get on their feet and produce results, they capacitate communities to do more. This can include strategies for building circular economies into this model. Finally without a global design commons, local production is not possible, and without local design production then the global commons is not possible. Creating such virtuous cycles is key.

This report on AbilityMate was conducted by Jose Ramos in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.

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“OpenROV started in 2001 as a project to make underwater exploration tools accessible to anyone, launched by Eric Stackpole and David Lang. The company shares much of its designs and cultivates a community of hobbyists that help test, modify and refine its products. Its main product so far has been a low cost kit that people order and assemble themselves, for an underwater drone that can explore to a depth of 100 meters. The company is now in the finishing stages of launching a pre-assembled and manufactured product called Trident.

Out of graduate school, Eric worked at NASA as an engineer, but was an active hobbyist. In part inspired by the maker movement, he felt a sense of possibility that he could create technology that could solve problems. After hearing a story about sunken treasure that was hidden in a cave area (the Hall City Cave in Hayfork, California), he discovered a reason and purpose to build such an underwater drone. This project helped him to find his cofounder David Lang, and also to get media attention. The co-founder David Lang was very astute about the need to build a community around the project, and a community building website. Once a prototype was built they attempted to retrieve the treasure they had heard of, however the project was beset by technical problems and no treasure was ultimately found. Yet in the process they had begun to build a community around the idea of DIY underwater exploration.

OpenROV evolved into an approach for prototyping underwater drones. OpenRov’s underwater drones have iterated through a number of phases. Throughout its development it has been involved in a number of maker faire’s and won a number of competitions. In 2012 OpenROV launched a kickstarter campaign raising over 100,000 dollars for a kit product. In 2015 OpenROV launched a new campaign that raised over $800,000 for its Trident drone. The company’s values center around the exploration of the unknown, creating technology which is revolutionary and having a big and positive impact on the world.

Business model and open source elements

OpenROV’s core business model is in selling kits and products that are highly engineered and relatively low cost compared to other products, based on many years of research and development. To do this the company eclectically uses a mix of open source hardware and conventional parts. The company maintains the majority of its designs as open source. However not all of its products are open-source, for reasons that will be explained.

As a general rule OpenROV shares what it can, much of the process in creating the drones and the parts / technology that make up. However it requires a huge amount of energy to document the engineering and development process. Documenting everything would not be possible, so it is important to make strategic decisions about where OpenROV decides to put its documentation energy. The filter that is used to make decisions about whether something will be open source or not is whether it will be beneficial to the community and to the company at the same time. The company cares more about the quality and performance of the product than in making it open source for open source’s sake.

An example of this is the use of the Qualcomm chip set. OpenROV decided to use this because it was the best and most appropriate part. The company has signed a nondisclosure agreement with Qualcomm, and as Eric explains “if we only allowed ourselves to use parts that are open source our hands would be tied.” In Eric’s opinion there is a subtle difference between community-based hardware and open source hardware. Non-open source hardware can still be low cost and have a large community of users and developers around it. For example their choice to use the BeagleBone Linux computer was not based on it being open source, but rather because it was low cost and because enough other people were developing with it that they could learn from. It is more important to have a healthy developer community where people can share and learn and build, which in Eric’s view is itself its own kind of open-source, whether based on proprietary hardware or not.

There is also the need to be careful about open sourcing elements of OpenROV that they have put huge investment in. If everything were open source, large-scale competitors / manufacturers, from China or elsewhere, could be easily able to replicate what they did, making OpenROV uncompetitive. OpenROV has put in well over $1 million into R&D costs and they need to make sure they get value back. For other elements of the design, where OpenROV does not feel over exposed, they do open source design elements and hope that people can tinker and build off the ideas.

Open-source for software has existed for a while, however for hardware it is still a new emerging space, and the need to translate research and development costs into future profits is still an issue in question that OpenROV grapples with. For this reason OpenROV straddles a fuzzy and shifting line between open source and proprietary elements. They see open source as a means to an end, and are more interested in democratizing DIY underwater exploration and building a bigger community and ecosystem of innovators.

Community dimensions of OpenROV

The more substantive dimension of open source for OpenROV is in the community dimensions. Eric believes that “everyone is smarter than anyone”, by which he means that more people working on the problem draws on more intelligence than simply a limited group. The community dimension of open-source allows for greater social momentum built around a project, something OpenROV has repeatedly experienced. Eric expressed that it is somewhat of a cliché that a community will produce lots of intellectual property to make something better. He feels that the “free IP” concept of open source is a myth. For him the bigger element that arises from openness is sharing something that he believes in with the community. This allows him to see what people value, pick up, and where the interest is. And he gets motivation and encouragement from the community as well. Communities are all about helping do the thing together that they mutually care about.

For OpenROV openness is closer to the idea of “user led innovation”, being able to see how a community engages with product. They have reaped the most benefits from understanding what the community’s interests are, what things they adopt, they try and build themselves. Cultivating a community is also a source of recruitment – finding people from the community and hiring them. For them those are bigger returns than any IP they have drawn from the community.

Building a global ecosystem?

One thing that they have noticed is that as they have open sourced the drone technology, other companies around the world have copied what they have done. Most of these competitors do not necessarily share back to the world their own unique additions. On the one hand the logic of this competition could be seen to be good. Competition can energize development of a market with a widening variety of niche areas. Like the iphone app community or Elon Musk’s decision to make Tesla designs open, the intent behind open sourcing is to create the conditions for social infrastructure to develop that supports all of the competitor’s in a system.

They also hope that ecosystem sharing emerges in this new niche area. Yet so far there have not been any companies that have done this. In OpenROV’s own community there are some examples where people are creating and sharing their own new designs, however is not the same as multiple enterprises driving the development of an industry sector globally.

Connections with research is one of those bright spots, there have been over 100 articles and essays written about OpenROV, including a number of theses. There are many relationships to universities, teams of researchers who have bought the products, corresponded with OpenROV, used of technology and adapted it. In many cases OpenROV have provided support on a pro bono basis. Therefore, in the area of research and development, there has been a space of open knowledge production which has emerged in the space of submersible robotics, which OpenROV has helped to spark.

Skills, competencies and decision making

Designing underwater drones requires a high degree of technical capability. Even those buying the kits need to have technical capabilities and feel comfortable with technology. Many of the users of the technology are small business owners involved in some form of underwater exploration.

The team itself has between 12 and 15 people working full time, and about half a dozen interns. The team itself is highly technical in orientation, what they do is hard-core engineering. The team does all of its own analysis and design work. Eric feels that this is the right way to spend resources in beginning – to make sure the product is excellent. He feels it is the hard-core engineering and research and development that has driven its success.

There is no formal problem-solving process or approach for the company. There is a lot of transparency between what everyone does and people can easily talk to each other. The environment is more like a group of friends rather than a boss with workers. There are not a lot of meetings in the company. If people are involved in the problem-solving process they will work with the people directly involved in this problem. Collaboration spills out organically from the need to solve technical challenges.

OpenROV also does not formally hire people. It attracts people who are passionate are then invites them to be part of the team. Team members feel a strong sense of alignment. People feel a sense of care for the projects that they are involved in and want to steer them in the right direction. It is not just a job where people feel they need to show up. If people don’t like the way things are going it bothers them and they’ll most likely say something. Ultimately the people who work as part of the team feel a sense of ownership for what we are doing.

Strengths or weakness of the open design approach

When assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the open design approach, a contrast is drawn between openness at an organizational level and openness at a social level. At an organizational level openness means that the work environment is such that people can and will debate various solutions and decisions. Not all will agree. It is harder to get decisions made, but the theory is that better decisions are ultimately made, and that those involved feel more alignment and ownership because they came to the decision themselves.

The same logic can be applied to openness at the social level. When OpenROV is open and describes the various steps that it takes in technology development, there are people who question what it is doing and point out other options. This ultimately takes more time and can create frustration, than if they just made decisions without openness to the user community. Being open to a community in the development process provides more options, more complexity, more decisions and raises the amount of work that needs to be done. However, it also means OpenROV can learn from the community and the community can help refine and support OpenROV. OpenROV does updates every month, and when there is a delay, OpenROV provides an explanation (e.g. if they decided to change a part etc.). OpenROV opens itself up to being second guessed, and providing answers in an open way takes energy. But it also means that there is the possibility of learning from a bigger system.

The weaknesses of working within the open source / open design approach is the increased time to explain internal decisions and answer questions, as well as competition that arises from openness. The other challenge are the expectations that people project onto OpenROV, the idealism associated with open source. The community may expect OpenROV to hold themselves to a higher bar than what is possible with respect to open source, but they may misunderstand the nature of the challenges OpenROV faces. It is challenging to manage these expectations, as a company that is pragmatically open source. For them, patent and open source are not mutually exclusive – and there may be blind spots in the discourse on open source that overlooks this.

Thoughts on the future

Into the future OpenROV will continue to be improvisational with open source, doing it where it can. It will continue to care about its community and building a community globally. What is most important for it is to nurture a community of makers, tinkerers, researchers and innovators, rather than simply open all innovation to manufacturers who will steal and compete on price basis. How OpenROV nurtures a community of such innovators through open source rather than opening up to non-innovating manufacturers with economies of scale is one of the biggest challenges to address.

This report was conducted in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.

Photo by 0xF2

Photo by ellen forsyth

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